This brings us, naturally, to EPCOT. It’s the weird uncle of Disney’s Florida holdings, a park modeled on world expositions—the last one of which to open stateside did so more than 30 years ago. For a quarter-century or more, Walt Disney World has received visitors who crowd into EPCOT without fully understanding what in the hell it’s supposed to be. Flummoxed by Walt Disney’s untimely death, his people delicately set aside his plans for a future Waltopia and went back to what they knew and understood: They rebuilt the 1964 New York World’s Fair, right down to the big metal ball.

That’s probably why Disney has no earthly idea what to do with EPCOT now. How do you get people excited for a cultural touchstone that hasn’t been seen in this country since 1984? And how to you appeal to out-of-country guests who’ve maybe been to recent Expos in Shanghai, Milan or Yeosu, and who aren’t impressed with Ellen DeGeneres’ fumbling attempts to understand sustainable energy? It’s a real goddamn problem, and Disney apparently still doesn’t know how to remedy it. Walt Disney World’s other three parks are all receiving huge, game-changing capital improvements: Magic Kingdom has its plus-sized Fantasyland, Hollywood Studios is getting Lucas’d, Animal Kingdom Avatar‘d. By comparison, EPCOT’s 2016 resolutions are to re-skin the Norway pavilion’s Maelstrom boat ride with a story that has only a desultory connection to Norway, and to make the popular Soarin’ ride, y’know, bigger-er.

Technology isn’t the problem. Nifty though the ride mechanisms of Universal’s big-deal Harry Potter rides may be, Disney has already arguably matched them with the giant slot cars of Test Track and Radiator Springs Racers, the RFID-guided vehicles of Mystic Manor and Luigi’s Rollickin’ Roadsters, and the relatively simple mechanism of Soarin’. (That’s saying nothing of the other ride mechanics Disney has pioneered or successfully adapted to new mediums, including those behind Tower of Terror, Expedition Everest and, hell, the Haunted Mansion. The humble Omnimover, turning people into moving cameras since 1967.)  The problem isn’t that the hang-time shenanigans of Soarin’ are passé, or that we can duplicate the Circle-Vision 360° experience with an app we can download free to our phones. The problems are in theme, story and cultural relevance, three things Imagineering is supposed to be good at.

For an example, I’ll skip over the two most obvious choices—Universe of Energy and the despairing wreck that is Journey Into Imagination—and consider the case of Reflections of China, the Circle-Vision 360° travelogue that replaced Wonders of China in 2003. Wonders needed badly to be replaced; I mean, gosh, China’s changed just a little bit since 1982. But given an opportunity to make something truly new and different, Disney acted clumsily: They paid just enough for a few minutes of new footage and, inexplicably, kept the Li Bai storyline from 1982, replacing the original actor—the great Keye Luke—with a double who doesn’t resemble Luke even in long shots. (Gone, too, is Luke’s splendid voiceover, replaced by a scab who doesn’t possess a tenth of Luke’s avuncular charm.)

Look, I’m just going to say it: There are at least a dozen Chinese actors recognizable to American audiences, from Michelle Yeoh to Steven Chow to Jackie Chan. Any one of these would make a suitable narrator for a 21st Century China, for a country that’s rapidly moving beyond our perceptions both good and bad. (And about the technology: I’d be willing to bet that somebody has already rigged up a drone-mounted, lightweight digital Circle-Vision 360° rig in their garage, something with greater maneuverability than a chopper. Just as long as we’re committed to the 360-degree thing.) The sequel to Wonders of China could have been entertaining, visually-dazzling and, y’know, informative.

(Though to be fair, I don’t suppose I should have expected quality filmmaking from last-gasp Eisner regime Disney; Reflections of China is imbued with just as much quality and sense as the Eddie Murphy Haunted Mansion and Disney California Adventure 1.0.  That Disney did only as much for China as necessary to get Hong Kong Disneyand open, and to  keep the film distribution pipes clear.)

EPCOT’s biggest current failings are in theme, story and cultural relevance, three things Imagineering is supposed to be good at.

Moving around the lagoon: Tromsø, Norway has an influential electronic music scene. The renewable energy sector of Germany is among the world’s most successful. Italy has a truly rich legacy of cinema, without which the likes of Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino probably wouldn’t exist as we know them now. And the United Kingdom is so very united that Scotland recently considered leaving it. EPCOT’s view of the world has always been sanitized and small, but now, in an age of Googling Up Stuff, its tiny planet schtick is at best embarrassing, at worst xenophobic. And when you take the extra step of replacing a country’s entire culture with an animated landscape and population created in Burbank … well, there’s really no point to having a World Showcase at all, if your idea of travel is getting people to take your cruise lines to man-made beaches, or simply to drive across town to see Frozen on Ice.

And it’s not as if the restaurants and retail of World Showcase are picking up the slack:

The World Showcase – A lot has changed in my opinion from what it used to be. I remember when I was a kid I bought a little Mercedes model car, kind of like a HotWheels car but German. … I thought it was so neat, even (had) Made In Germany (written) on it. Nowadays, apart from the Japanese market (Mitsukoshi) every one of the stores in the countries have a bunch of crap. Want a keychain with Downton Abbey on it? They’ve got that in England. Do you need Maple syrup that’s available at Publix? They’ve got that in Canada. It’s pretty sad that every country just sells t-shirts with what the country is known for, not actual products from the country.

We ate at Via Napoli in Italy & were pretty disappointed with the food/price/service. We told the hostess we were celebrating a birthday & she made note of it but nothing was done. We had some pastries from Les Halles Boulangerie-Patisserie, they weren’t thing to get excited over. Maybe the food is better during Food & Wine time (which we missed by a few days, unfortunately).

That was TripAdvisor reviewer Billy H, a visitor from Nashville, Tennessee, in a review titled “EPCOT needs to go back to its original mission statement.” It’s not just the Disnerds blog who’ve noticed EPCOT sliding into irrelevance; the marketplace is beginning to catch on.

Back to The Martian. One of the things I liked best about it was the easygoing, unfussy way in which Ridley Scott presented the future. In a way, it’s the bright flipside to what he did with Blade Runner in 1982; he identified which present-day trends were likely to expand, and turned up their volume while leaving everything else untouched. Meaning: Rick Deckard hunts down advanced artificial intelligence in a heavily globalized Los Angeles while still eating modern-day street food and drinking brown liquor from regular glasses, and the crew of Ares III listens to seventies disco and maintains a treadmill regimen. The future isn’t about a whole-scale change to the way we live; it’s all about incremental change. And incremental change is easy to portray and maintain, if you do it right the first time.

EPCOT 1.0 embodied this principle much better than its present-day iteration does. One of the first things to wow me when I first visited in 1983, aside from the sheer scale of the place, was its interactive features. The WorldKey information kiosks were the first touchscreens I had ever seen, and now that technology is on a device I carry with me (and probably look at too often). Ditto the voice-to-text technology of AT&T (in CommuniCore West, RIP) and the social media-style instant polling of Future Choice Theater (CommuniCore East, gone too soon). A new EPCOT doesn’t need to be conceptualized from the top down, beginning with the multimillion-dollar ride vehicle and a new warehouse-sized dodecahedron or whatever; it can begin with something as basic as showing off what’s new in UI, or sacrificing some of Germany’s retail space so the country can talk up its Energiewende. Or by simply committing to improving the quality of EPCOT’s dining and imported goods to a level slightly above Cost Plus.

It doesn’t need to be a billion-dollar improvement initiative, and it doesn’t need to wait for an EPCOT-themed movie to help visitors to understand the place. (This seems a good time to say that I was in tune with Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland until its dreary, exposition-heavy final third. The film’s showpiece “Pin-Ultimate Experience” sequence, buoyed by a Future World loop-ready Michael Giacchino score, reminds me of how I felt when I saw EPCOT for the first time. ) The future, and the world we live in, are concepts that are already familiar to every one of us; Disney only needs to make them personal again. Walt Disney’s original EPCOT was intensely personal, arguably being the world he wanted to live in. Disney’s current, cynical approach to EPCOT is worse than impersonal; it is personality-free, an empty vessel. And with the Frozen boat ride, the company is making it plain that EPCOT is about championing Disney’s own aspirations, not our own.

“If (kids) go to bed dreaming about science, they wake up with ideas,” a character says in Eric Stephenson’s graphic novel series Nowhere Men. Whenever Disney gets around to noticing EPCOT again, they should consider the dreams that EPCOT once hoped to inspire … even if some of those dreams were Made In Germany.

But the primary reason I started Your Souvenir Guide was because at the time, there were a bunch of blogs about what Disneyland looked like, but few talking about how it feels. And Disneyland is a place that one feels their way through—an emotional truth so widely accepted that Disney gets away with using it in their advertising, over and over, and no one says boo.

The precise nature and working mechanics of Disneyland’s emotional appeal is not something I can pin down in a few words (that would take, oh, the length of a novel), but I can give you the elevator speech, like so: Disneyland is a place where remembered feelings collect and stick. While the Park has substantially changed over the course of sixty years, the old hooks remain firmly in place: Space Mountain has always been a kid’s first thrill ride, and always will be; the Haunted Mansion has always been terrific theatre, and always will be; Main Street has always had a castle at the end of it, and always will have. The “basement” of Pirates of the Caribbean has always smelled the same; Dole Whips have always tasted the same . And you have always experienced these things through the channel of your emotions, and you probably always will. Your eight-year-old self is still caught on those old hooks, and he waves to you as you get caught on them again.

I’m happy to say that there are now several blogs exploring the history and psychology of Disney’s theme parks, and they’re doing a better job of it than I ever could. My favorite of these blogs is Passport to Dreams Old and New, by a longtime themepunk who writes under the name FoxxFur. (I don’t know her real name, and I’ll never ask it.) Passport to Dreams knocks my socks off. She provides exhaustive histories of Walt Disney World attractions, both deserved and undeserved; she produces sharp, hyper-literate theses on theme park design pretty much by the pound; and she’s sat through some Disney movies that, my God, I will never watch again. She’s got entries tagged “Park Theory” and “Presentationalism,” for chrissakes. It boggles the mind that Disney hasn’t hired her outright—if not to inform their design choices and efforts to maintain thematic continuity, then to keep her singular genius inside the beltway.

Disney is attempting to contain and manage our stampede. Club 33 is exploding because we have a terrible craving to feel special. And heaven forbid we take our kids to an amusement park without giving them games to play on top of everything else.

But earlier this month, FoxxFur tossed a bombshell into the mix. In a post titled Notes on a Time That Was Not Happy, she says right out: “2014 was the year I lost faith in Disneyland.” She goes on to say that Disney has failed to engage her personal fandom, which is built upon “three poles: excellent design, historical legacy, and conceptual integrity.” To her thinking, the design failure of Disneyland’s Club 33 expansion (resulting in several blunders, key among the the loss of the Court of Angels, one of the Park’s few quiet spots), the removal of the waterfalls from the lobby of WDW’s Polynesian Village resort (her “historical legacy” item), and the failed concept of EPCOT (manifested in the decision to open a “Frozen”-themed boat ride in the Norway pavilion), were all crimes unforgivable.

“I want to see passion projects, not spreadsheet low-risk investments,” she writes. “Disney controls the most remarkable creative staff in the industry and they set them to work toiling out things like Cars Land: beautifully done, emotionally hollow. Is it any wonder so many Imagineers are jumping ship to Universal Creative?”

Well, okay. First things first: She’s one hundred percent correct about the Club 33 expansion and the plotlessness of EPCOT. (I can’t speak to the Polynesian waterfalls; I’m a product of west-coast Disney.) Considering how beautifully the expansion of WDW’s Fantasyland was done, it’s utterly remarkable how artlessly EPCOT is being handled, and just how ugly and wrongheaded that Club 33 expansion is.

I’m in lesser agreement about the ascension of Universal Creative. I don’t think they’re all that. Without a J.K. Rowling riding herd on a project—essentially shepherding work done by other, more experienced artists and designers into another medium—you don’t get a Hogsmeade or Diagon Alley. Universal did not invent the look of Diagon Alley; they merely inflated it to hide the show building. It amazes me that Universal continually gets a pass for its wearying assortment of shitty, TV-in-a-moving-box rides and strip-mall facades. Say what you will about Disney’s underwhelming Little Mermaid dark ride, but it will chug on, transporting thousands of visitors daily, long after Universal has swapped out Transformers and Despicable Me for some other 3-D motion crap. The human eye wants real dimension and real shape, and 3-D rides can’t deliver it. The best thing I can say about the beautifully-executed Harry Potter attractions is also the most damning: They are Disneyesque.

And as for Cars Land: Gee, I like it. But I liked the first Cars movie, too, seeing it for what it was: a love letter to a vanishing time. That phrase describes more than half of what is successful and beloved at Disneyland. Even if you have no prior knowledge of the Cars movies—as my girlfriend did not, when she saw Disney California Adventure for the first time last October—it’s possible to appreciate Cars Land simply as a preserved Route 66 desert town, with all its Googie neon signage intact. (Ironic that Disney should build such a thing, after it conspired with the city of Anaheim to eliminate such signage from the resort corridor surrounding Disneyland.) Cars Land is impeccably designed and beautifully lit, and its rides are legit fun. The photos I took of my girlfriend and me at the head of its “street,” framed by neon signs and the Cadillac Range, matter just as much to me as the photos we took in front of Sleeping Beauty Castle. The feeling was there.

We ask Disney to transport us. Cars Land does so. It makes me want to go on road trips, just as Pirates of the Caribbean makes me want to burn down villages. The “emotionally hollow” argument seems attached to the common dislike of the Cars film, and frankly, I don’t agree with it at all.

But I’m not trying to diminish FoxxFur’s main point, which is a valid and important one: In many important respects, Disney seems to be losing the plot. But I would add a level to the discussion that none of us will like to hear: At least half of Disney’s recent blunders can be attributed to us, the theme park-going public.

It’s our own fault that the Enchanted Tiki Room and Country Bear Jamboree have been hacked down to accommodate shorter attention spans. It’s our fault that Club 33’s membership has swelled to the size of a religion. And it’s indisputably our fault that Disneyland is losing all its quiet spaces and out-of-the-way spots. Such things are difficult to maintain when nearly a tenth of Disneyland has become a parking lot for Volkswagen-sized double decker strollers.

To a large degree, Disney is reacting, not acting. Like Disneyland’s founder, who once demanded that a concrete walkway be laid over a path that visitors were cutting through a grassy knoll, Disney is attempting to contain and manage our stampede. Club 33 is exploding because we have a terrible craving to feel special, to be part of something exclusive—and a willingness to throw money at it. The Park walkways are being widened into freeways because we take up larger footprints than we once did. (The family with a Hummer in the driveway will easily convince itself that it needs a Hummer on the walkway, too.) And heaven forbid we take our kids to an amusement park without giving them games to occupy their diminished attention spans. MagicBands, dining plans, the cartooning of EPCOT—these are all monsters that we had a hand in making. We gain nothing by pretending that Disney made these decisions in a vacuum.

The only remedy I can suggest for these problems is that old chestnut, dollar voting. Club 33 won’t keep growing if less of us try to bust down its doors. But that only takes us so far. The sad fact is that both FoxxFur and I will keep attending our respective Parks even if the popcorn is replaced with buckets of warm butterfat with straws. We have to acknowledge, in our heart of hearts, that the Magic Kingdoms of our youth have been trampled down. Some of those old hooks have been wrenched free by the crowds, and our memories lost with them. And all we can do in the face of that chaos is find some new hooks, and allow ourselves to get caught on them. Maybe write about how that feels, once in a while. It would be nice if we could get back to the things that matter to us, like our unfinished novels, or who in the hell wants a goddamn Avatar-themed ride, anyway.

This is what happened the last time George Lucas and Marvel worked in close quarters.

By the way, the narrator of this trailer is my late friend, Gene McGarr. He didn’t write this shit; he just read it aloud for money, “trapped in a world he never made.” Rest in peace, Gene.

I have two reasons for posting this image here today. First and foremost is that this shot has found its way into the Tumblr/Pinterest realm of hazy authorship, and I need to assert my claim to this thing before it ends up being credited to some other horny idiot. (At this time I’d like to express my gratitude to Heather at I Can Haz Cheezburger?, who responded to my pissy email with more politesse than it deserved.)

The other reason I’m posting here today is because I think the October 2009 visit that produced this irresistible image was my most recent visit to the parks. Three years ago. I can’t believe it, either. I’ve been to Walt Disney World twice in the last three years, and have enjoyed my visits there–but I haven’t been back to the theme park(s) that inspired the creation of this bl-g for three years, due to financial hardship and simple bad luck.

Obviously I miss it. I miss the ways it feeds, and feeds on, my imagination. Some criticize Disney’s theme parks for being tightly-controlled experiences; they compare it to stuff like Burning Man, where you can pretty much write your own dusty-dicked adventure from start to finish. I’m not criticizing that–in fact, I’ve just agreed to attend my first Burn next year, in spite of my intense dislike of portable toilets. But it’s unfair to criticize Disneyland or Disney California Adventure for telling stories in their own way. No two people hear stories the same way. And where someone else sees a shelf of expensive figurines from Disney’s animated movies, I see the inset photo.

Sophia Loren and Jayne Mansfield at Romanoff’s, 1957. Photo by Joe Shere.

In a way, that’s what Disneyland has always been about, to my thinking: It’s whatever you bring to it. If you’re a collector, you see the shopping. If you’re a parent, you see the Park through your children. And if you’re like me, you see the artistry, the detail, and the coincidences. You look for these coincidences, these strange connections, and if you’re lucky, every so often you get a photo of one of them.

I’m happy to say that I’m a full-time working journalist once again. (You can read my stuff at Vegas Seven, a Las Vegas alternative weekly magazine, if you’re into that sort of thing.) And I’m closer to Disneyland, financially and spatially, than I’ve been in years. If I wanted to, I could drive there right now; it’s only three to four hours’ drive from Las Vegas to Anaheim, and a 40-minute walk to the three-hour line for Radiator Springs Racers.

But today, I find it’s enough to want it. In a way, missing Disneyland fills the heart as much as actually being there does. The imagination stretches beyond the berm; you wonder what it would be like to go there with a friend who hasn’t been there yet (I yearn to be the Ray Bradbury-like guide to someone’s Charles Laughton), or you wonder if there’s something there you haven’t yet seen–some strange and wondrous coincidence, waiting to jump in front of you and challenge you to take its picture.

It was not a good week for me to visit what had been freshly re-named “The Disneyland Resort.” I’d just broken up with a girl two weeks before, and I truly wasn’t feeling up to the single-rider experience. (Solo Disneyland can be fun, but Doombuggies and Mad Teacups are meant to be shared.) But work is work, and if Las Vegas Life magazine was to get the travel and lifetstyle piece it wso richly deserved, I had to mouse up, paste a convincing fake smile on my face and try to have real fun. There was no other way to approach it.

Days one and four were “travel days,” during which I enjoyed half-days in Disneyland proper, forlornly riding the train around the Park over and over again. On day two—February 7, 2001—the gathered press was invited to preview the bars, shops and restaurants of Downtown Disney, as well as some of the DCA attractions. That night was a party for B-list celebrities and other dignitaries, a sneak preview before the new park opened to the public on February 8.

I was not amused. I liked Downtown Disney’s bars and restaurants—finally I could get a Cuba Libre withing staggering distance of Pirates of the Caribbean!—but the breakup painted everything dark, and Disney’s nice gestures (including a comped room at the Disneyland Hotel, complete with swag bag and the latest issue of Brill’s Content) only served to make me feel worse than I already did. If a swag bag lands on a hotel bed and there’s no Facebook to share it with, did it really happen?

And there was something else, a truth I was loath to admit even to myself: Disney California Adventure paled terribly in contrast with its neighbor. I didn’t dislike the new park then, and I never have — but even then I could see that a tremendous opportunity had gone only partially recognized. There were too many shops and restaurants and not enough attractions. Dark rides, the bedrock of any Disney park, were in critically short supply; DCA only opened with one, the justly maligned Superstar Limo (now replaced by a Monsters Inc. dark ride). The bulk of the new park’s attractions were either films, which you could watch once and be satisfied, or carnival-style attractions that were best enjoyed in summertime. (Disney California Adventure opened in the midst of a cold winter downpour.) Such were DCA’s failings that, a scant five years on, Disney would commit upwards of a billion dollars towards “fixing” the park — a process that will be completed this June, with a “grand re-opening” that I hope I’m invited to.

Anyway, on that preview night, I was mostly unhinged. Disney was serving up free vodka martinis and I slammed seven of them in quick order. I was wounded, spoiling for a fight. (Finally, I heckled the Brian Wilson-less Beach Boys, which got much of the bile out of my system.) I was in a perfect place to receive one of Disney’s patented magical surprises, and to my delight, I received one in Soarin’ Over California.

If you haven’t experienced this flight simulator attraction, either at DCA or at EPCOT, I advise you to skip the rest of this paragraph; it’s really something you have to enjoy firsthand. Its component parts are simply understood: a large, curved IMAX screen, an innovative gondola system that hangs you above that screen, and a magnificent score by the late Oscar-winning film composer Jerry Goldsmith — to my mind, one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written for a Disney theme park. Taken individually, these things give you a notion of how Soarin’ Over California works, but they can’t tell you how Soarin’ feels. For that, you need to wait in a 70-minute line, chuckle through the Patrick Warburton safety video, and take a seat in one of those suspended gondolas.

Soarin’ Over California is a dream. Pure and simple. In one guileless, inspired stroke of genius, Walt Disney Imagineering has managed to capture the sensation of flying in your dreams. The California scenes, sun-dappled and perfect, are projected at a sharp 48 frames per second, and the suspended gondola places you inside of them; your vision is deliberately fixed on the screen. almost without distraction. (You can see the dangling feet of riders above you, but that only enhances the experience; it’s fun to watch other riders “running” over the Pacific coastline, and lifting their feet to clear the harmless, projected obstacles.) Evocative scents are sprayed into the gondola at key moments: pine, ocean, orange groves. And as cheesy as it all must look from the ground (or on YouTube), there’s something that happens to you in those five minutes that can’t be explained by simple mechanics. You come to believe.

Goldsmith reportedly came down from his first ride on Soarin’ in tears, and truth be told, so did I. I couldn’t believe that Disney had found the place inside of me that wanted to fly and played directly to it. When the ride ended I burst into spontaneous applause, and I wasn’t the only one. All the assembled guests cheered wildly, and guests continue to applaud the conclusion to Soarin’ to this day. While Disney California Adventure was not a perfect theme park when it opened its gates, it did boast one perfect attraction—one that reminded me there’s always a blue sky above low-hanging clouds.

Writer Dave Hickey once complimented Disney’s ability to “invest anything with the pulse of human aspiration,” from mice to rocks to hanging gondolas. The machinery that runs Soarin’ thrums with that lifeblood. For all of Disney’s talk of “dreams” and “magic,” it has been a rare occasion these past 20 years that Disney has built an attraction that is truly dreamlike, magical. Soarin’ Over California, pardon the pun, rises to the occasion.

(Disclaimer: EPCOT ranks second in parks I’ve actually visited. Haven’t been to the parks in Tokyo, Paris, or Hong Kong. For what it’s worth: 1. Disneyland; 2. EPCOT; 3. Disney Animal Kingdom; 4. The Magic Kingdom; 5. Disney California Adventure (before the remake); 6. VMK; 7. Disney Hollywood Studios. Challenges to this list are cheerfully welcomed.)

I’m happy to report that I had a wonderful day. Though my recently-retired parents and I explored the park at a relative saunter, we managed to take in nearly all our attractions, or at least what’s left of them. The best attractions at EPCOT remain Impressions de France, Spaceship Earth, the Gran Fiesta Tour, the Listen to the Land boat ride, and Test Track. Reflections of China, The Seas avec Nemo, and Maelstrom (which I did not see, sadly) are bubbling under the top five.

We did get on Soarin’, but I don’t count it among my EPCOT favorites because I consider it a Disney California Adventure attraction that wandered by mistake. And we had to skip Mission: Space, but I’m okay with that; I’m at best indifferent to it. To my mind, it’s not a true space pavilion: You learn nothing about the cosmos, and you’re even told right up front, by no less august a personage than actor Gary Sinise, that you won’t really be going on a trip to Mars; it’s all a simulation designed to test your ability to press a button when you’re told to press a button. It should be renamed Mission: Space Simulator, and it may well be, once I’ve sent a note to the Better Business Bureau.

Speaking of consumer fraud: O Canada, the CircleVision 360 movie now showing in the Canada pavilion, needs to be redone. It’s kind of awful. It has too many aerial establishing shots and too many instances of Martin Short clowning in front of a bluescreen. Generally speaking, it’s a bad thing when you come out of a travelogue wanting to visit somewhere less than you did when you went in.

Not to say that Short isn’t a good choice for a host. He’s genuinely funny, and let’s face it, we can’t help but like him. (His old SCTV “Monday Night Curling” routine, glimpsed briefly in the film, lays me right out.) But his tone in O Canada is too broad, too goofball—shortcomings I’m inclined to ascribe to the script and direction rather than the actor/comedian, who really works hard in the film. If nothing else, his whole closing schtick—”How do I get out of here? I need help”—should have been red-penciled early in the process; it lands hard and flat and diminishes all the pretty views that came before. The misuse of Short points to Disney’s recent attempts to paste over EPCOT’s big themes with feeble comedy: Journey into Imagination has been reduced to a fart joke, Universe of Energy screwed into the equivalent of Ellen DeGeneres jiggling her keys at a toddler.

In fact, both of the Circle-Vision 360° travelogues of World Showcase—ní hǎo, Reflections of China—have enough problems to warrant do-overs. For example, both of them end with the narrator saying something to the effect of “The best part of our country is our people,” followed by a montage of faces. Well, yeah. I would suggest that those people be moved into the heart of the film itself, seiing as countries are, in fact, made up of people doing fascinating shit. I can view Niagara Falls from the air via Google Maps Putting real human persons in front of that vista, taking photos or getting married or whatever, is what makes it impressive.

In any case, EPCOT remains as eye-popping an experience as it was when I first visited the park in 1983. Obviously I’m older now, and I no longer believe that Disney has built the future and united the world, but the pop science still goes down smooth, and the shops, travelogues and restaurants continue to charm. You can say what you will about Disney’s Florida theme parks — the budget-bursting expense of visiting them,  the cultural and intellectual stasis some say they’re trapped in, the “declining by degrees”—but those parks continue to prove Disney’s ability to build and maintain a themed environment. Even its closest competitor was designed and built by ex-Disney Imagineers, which only goes to my point … and the monstrously expensive and admittedly awesome Harry Potter attractions aside, Universal’s parks don’t have that Imagineering shimmer and sheen. They don’t inflate the wrinkles out of your brain.

Since 1955, Disney has owned the theme park thing lock, stock and gondola … and EPCOT, with its high-minded concept, nakedly corporate lineage and awkward name, is proof positive of that. There’s no good reason this park should have worked and continue to work. It’s not “EPCOT Princessland” or “EPCOT of Adventure.” It’s the same permanent world’s fair it has always been, still stumping for big oil, room-sized computers and globalization — and remarkably, the kids Still Want to Go To There. They don’t care if the message is several years out of date. It’s the environment that’s winning them over; the ideas have become purely secondary to the wow.

Whatever you’re doing now, I want you to bow in the direction of WED in Burbank, circa 1975. Those original themepunks knew their shit.

Also:

• The Disney Dining Plan is a stupid idea. But I’m mostly saying that because it tends to jam up Le Cellier at lunchtime, and I’ve been jonesing for their beer cheese soup since 2007.
• I really, truly love Gran Fiesta Tour. The excellent Passport to Dreams Old and New blog does a note-perfect job in describing why I love the revamped boat ride, and I strongly suggest you follow the above link and read FoxxFur’s piece.
• Using low-resolution video images and ancient stock footage in 70MM Showscan films is unacceptable. If Disney truly feels that Symbiosis is what closes on Saturday night, they oughtn’t have dumped footage from that heartstoppingly gorgeous EPCOT original into Circle of Life: An Environmental Fable, where it only serves to make the aforementioned junk footage and Saturday morning cartoon-quality animation look even worse than it is. That said, the opening of Circle of Life—in which the titular song is used over recycled footage from Symbiosis—is so affecting that I’m willing to watch the film again, relishing its opening and closing sequences, and whistling through the artlessness that’s gunking up the works.

The funny thing is that Disney seems to be encouraging people not to care about John Carter. I can’t think of a reason that Disney’s marketing arm, a more-or-less infallible alien intelligence, would do these things to a film they actually want people to see.

The Name on the Cover. John Carter of Mars is a swashbuckling hero; John Carter is a nobody who picked both his names randomly from a phone book.

The Trailers. Tell us nothing, and worse yet, they tell us nothing to symphonic Zeppelin. Symphonic Zeppelin. You might as well hang a sign on the thing that says From the culture that brought you “Heavy Metal 2000.”

The Font on the Poster. It’s Basic Commercial Black, as seen on the signage of the New York City Subway. Why not Interstate, as long as we’re pulling industrial fonts straight outta our ass? How in the hell is this flat, utilitarian typeface supposed to fire us up and make us wanna see some CGI Barsoomians, doing whatever it is CGI Barsoomians do? This is the font that Helvetica uses on its online dating profile to make itself look hotter than it is.

Uh-oh: Nikki Finke just predicted a $30 million opening weekend. John Carter is about to get its ass handed to it by The Lorax. I’m coming, John! Mi hermano! Blast the symphonic Zeppelin to distract them, and I’ll be there as soon as I can.

Story and Song from the Hanted Mansion from David Witt on Vimeo.

Via my friend David Wahl, whose Mostly Forbidden Zone blog is one of my daily habits: A terrific animation of the classic Story and Song from the Haunted Mansion LP, created by his friend David Witt at Quasi-Interesting Paraphernalia Incorporated. I’ll never be able to look at the LP again without seeing these subtle movements in my periphery. Who knew an LP could be haunted?

Yes, the Avatar attractions we’re now planning for Disney Animal Kingdom are a response to the runaway success of Universal Orlando’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter. As you’ve long suspected, we profit from our theme parks; they’re not a public trust.

No, we couldn’t come up with our own franchise to compete with Potter. Pirates of the Caribbean and Star Wars already have a presence in the parks, and we can’t build around them without screwing up already-themed areas at great risk; we don’t dare rip up that much Walt. Also, Tron has too narrow an appeal, Prince of Persia was a stupid idea from the word go, and you know what we’re doing with Cars.

Yes, you’re absolutely right: The reason we didn’t announce this at the D23 convention was because contracts weren’t yet in place. Good investigative work, o savvy observer of our business.

No, it doesn’t bother us that James Cameron is kind of an epic asshole. Why? Because’s an asshole who gets your money, again and again, despite his flat storytelling and crotch-grabbing award acceptance speeches.

No, we can’t put it in Disney Hollywood Studios. That’s not the park that so desperately needs paid admissions. And Avatar kinda fits into Animal Kingdom better, anyway, because it has trees and animals and stuff.

Yes, it would be nice to have those KUKA Robocoaster usage rights about now.

Yes, we expect Geoff Carter will show up, despite the fact that he’s never seen Avatar and he never, ever wants to see Avatar.

EDIT, SEPTEMBER 21, 9:30 A.M. PACIFIC TIME: Less than a day after I posted this entry, Disney released a statement that more or less approximates it in tone. You’re welcome, Mr. Staggs. I’ll invoice you shortly.

Shortly before he struck out for Anaheim, I gave him the advice I give everyone who doesn’t want to visit Disneyland but is compelled to go for reasons beyond their control: Look at the details and the artistry, and to try and divorce Disney now from Disney then.  Walt Disney didn’t build a theme park to compete with other theme parks, or to sell more monogrammed Cars 2 crapola; he built it because he wanted a place he could enjoy as much as his two preteen daughters. I told my friend to visit that Disneyland, the one Uncle Walt built without consulting a single focus group.

And he did. My friend loved Disneyland. He wasn’t wild about the crowds and the double-decker strollers, but he loved the architecture, the lay of the “lands, “ and nearly every single attraction he tried. One kind of attraction, however, engaged him above and beyond all the others.

“At some point, I decided that any one of the dark rides would be worthwhile,” he said, “and I was right.”

Disneyland’s dark rides are the gold threads in the Park’s tapestry. Other Disneyland attractions may enjoy more prominence, more pride of place (even my friend lavished fervent praise on the E-ticket attractions: Pirates of the Caribbean, Haunted Mansion, Space Mountain, et al)—but without the dark rides of Fantasyland, Mickey’s Toontown and Critter Country, none of Disneyland’s marquee attractions would exist. They’re what Walt Disney started with: A trio of Fantasyland dark rides (Snow White’s Scary Adventures, Peter Pan’s Flight, and Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride), plus a steam railroad, a riverboat and miscellaneous spinners, train and boat rides. Imagination-wise, those dark rides did most of the heavy lifting in Disneyand’s early years: They are sealed worlds within Disneyland’s sealed world, and nothing of the outside world penetrates those painted scrims lit by backlight. You can’t even bring your own ego with you. You are a spirit, floating free through the storybook, enveloped in whimsy and wonder and fear.

One thing I couldn’t give my friend before his trip was a top-to-bottom rating of Disneyland’s dark rides, but I can give you one of those. For the sake of this list, I am defining “dark ride” as a two-to-three minute attraction based on one of Disney’s animated films, excluding those attractions that are too epic in scale to be called a simple dark ride (it’s a small world), more midway game than dark ride (Buzz Lightyear’s Astro Blasters), or not located in Disneyland at all (Monsters Inc.: Mike and Sully to the Rescue). These are the attractions that caused an old, crusty punk to regress back into a teenage theater geek, and he’s far from being the only one.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND

GRADE: A

If the purpose of a Fantasyland dark ride is to put you inside the animated film upon which it’s based, this three-and-a-half minute dark ride is Disneyland’s most faithfully realized.  It truly is the real-life analogue of Disney’s animated Alice in Wonderland: the trip down the rabbit hole, the garden of singing flowers, and the marching playing cards are all represented here, and they make about as much sense as they did in the 1951 film. Love or hate the animated Alice, there’s no denying that it was a series of colorful and lunatic episodes without the heart Disney’s animators gave Snow White or Pinocchio. Oh, sure, the film has one of Disney’s plucky heroines at its center, but it’s not really about Alice: She stumbles into situations and scenarios without fully understanding or wanting to understand what’s happening to her, and she seemingly hasn’t learned anything by the end of the film. She has no character arc, just an inexplicable lost-time episode—and the ride reflects that, with your caterpillar-shaped ride vehicle bursting through a succession of seemingly disjointed set pieces, each one more fascinating and claustrophobic and terrifying than the one before it. In other words, this Alice a flawless translation from two dimensions to three. Alice, the dark ride, is everything it needs to be: a shot of candied hallucinogen, vividly colorful and manic.

PETER PAN’S FLIGHT

GRADE: A-

Though shorter than the Alice attraction by more than a minute and fifteen seconds, the dark ride based on Disney’s 1953 Peter Pan routinely draws much longer lines; it’s not unheard of to wait longer than an hour for these two minutes and twenty seconds in Neverland. Themepunks and Disnerds cite a number of reasons for this: the enduring appeals of the film and its characters, a lower hourly capacity than other Fantasyland attractions, blah blah blah. The real reason for the monster success of Peter Pan Flight is that its ride vehicles are suspended from the ceiling, and this novelty—which is pretty goddamned unique, really—has yet to lose its allure in nearly six decades of near-continuous operation. I don’t precisely recall what Peter Pan was like before all the Fantasyland dark rides were refreshed in 1983, but I do know that the pirate ship ride vehicles have always hung from the ceiling, and they have always taken their sweet time soaring over moonlit London and starlit Neverland; the “You Can Fly” portion of the ride accounts for nearly half its running time. Frankly, I could spend hours drifting over those “streets” and through those fiber-optics stars, but minutes is all you get, and perhaps that’s the real secret of Peter Pan’s hour-long queue: It is the only one of Fantasyland’s dark rides whose excitement is still building even as it ends. That’s a stunt worthy of Hitchcock.

SNOW WHITE’S SCARY ADVENTURES

GRADE: B+

Two of the best effects in Snow White’s Scary Adventures occur even before you hop into one of the dark ride’s mine car vehicles. If you look at the window in the tower of the attraction’s castle façade long enough, you’ll see the Evil Queen part the curtains to glare at you. Touch the golden apple at the queue entrance and you’ll hear her cackling. There are other special effects in this effects-heavy dark ride that are just as surprising—the Evil Queen’s transformation into the Old Hag is clever and scary as hell—but none of them are quite as potent as getting the stink-eye and being laughed at. Don’t listen to your parents: The Evil Queen is real, babies.  She’s the true star of this aptly named two-minute dark ride, despite the ingénue’s name on the marquee; she is the Terminator wearing the leathery hide of Amy Winehouse. (Too soon?) And when the Old Hag “dies” at the end of the ride (some business with lightning; it’s all very ambiguous), it’s as unconvincing as Olivia Wilde’s death at the end of that cowboy/alien mashup. Run outside and look at the tower; the Queen lives on, unbroken, just as Wilde lives on in her own “House.” Please make the scary women stop. Actually, don’t. Not ever.

MR. TOAD’S WILD RIDE

GRADE: B-

As I said of the Peter Pan dark ride, I don’t remember exactly what Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride was like before it was gutted and rebuilt in 1983, but I do recall one thing with absolute certainty: it was better. The two-minute dark ride, loosely based on a 1949 animated short film that I guarantee most of you haven’t seen since childhood (if at all), is indeed a wild ride—you literally crash through it, banging through one set of painted flats after the next, never really getting a sense of what you’re looking at. I suppose a joyride is a joyride, but I’m old-fashioned: I like to know a little bit about the people and animals I’m running down with my car. What color are their entrails? How mellifluous are their screams? Mostly, I’m bothered that one of the ride’s best set pieces—the pitch-black “train tunnel”—is over so quickly that you never really get a chance to be scared. Then again, the next set piece is Hell … yes, that Hell. It’s red and steamy and demon-riddled and kind of wonderful, and it makes up for every last thing that came before it.

ROGER RABBIT’S CAR TOON SPIN

GRADE: C

Everything Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride does wrong, Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin very nearly does right. The winding indoor queue is atmospheric and packed with story details. The ride vehicles can be spun 360 degrees, helpful if you’ve missed a detail or simply want to ride backwards. The effects, the animated show figures, and the set design—every last bit of it is impeccably done. So why is it that this three-and-a-half minute dark ride seems so alienated from the witty 1988 film on which it’s based? Of all Disneyland’s dark rides, this one feels the least Disneylike to me; it replicates the frenetic pacing of Who Framed Roger Rabbit’s action sequences, but lacks the film’s emotion and sentimentality. It’s a pretty bloodless exercise, and while it’s easily to look at Car Toon Spin (and from nearly any angle, thanks to that usable steering wheel), it’s tough to make yourself feel one way or another about it. Dizziness is not an emotion.

PINOCCHIO’S DARING JOURNEY

GRADE: C-

Considering the richly detailed and breathtakingly gorgeous world painted into Disney’s 1940 Pinocchio, the Disneyland dark ride based on the film is surprisingly slight. The three-minute Pinocchio’s Daring Journey is a pleasant enough diversion; the Pleasure Island portion of the ride is suitably lurid, and Geppetto’s workshop is so cozy that you could swear you feel the heat from the “fireplace.” But there are no special effects really worth the mention (the “Pepper’s Ghost” effect that allows the Blue Fairy to vanish is used to far superior effect in the Haunted Mansion, which preceded Daring Journey by longer than a decade), and the story is even more difficult to follow than even the nearly plotless Alice dark ride, and it pivots largely on Jiminy Cricket yelling directions at you: “Don’t go in there! Look out! This way!” It’s like the time just after you got your driver’s license, when you thought it’d be fun to drive your parents to Applebee’s. How wrong you were.

THE MANY ADVENTURES OF WINNIE-THE-POOH

GRADE: D

I must confess that I’m coming at this three-minute dark ride from a disadvantage. The character of Winnie-the-Pooh never made much of an impact on me—not in A.A. Milne’s charming books, not in Disney’s 1966 featurette Winnie-the-Pooh and the Honey Tree (released almost a year to the day before I was born), and not in Disneyland, where Pooh merchandise sold gangbusters even before 2003, when Disney finally saw fit to give the tubby ursine his own dark ride. Still, I suspect I’d find The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh underwhelming even if I had drank the honey. There isn’t much to recommend the ride: the character animation is limited; the effects are modest and copied largely from Disneyland’s other dark rides; and the sets are pleasant but forgettable. I understand how it might appeal to very young children, being moderately paced, sunshine-bright and not the least bit scary, but little kids grow up, and there’s nothing here for older children, teens or parents. Two things in the ride’s favor: the wait to get on is rarely longer than five minutes, and as the Disnerds and Passholes are fond of saying, the air conditioning is nice and cold.